Thursday, November 29, 2012

Interactive Event Map

This week we started our unit "Book A Trip Through North Carolina". The students have really enjoyed reading our first book in this unit "The Mystery of Black Beard The Pirate". In fact, last night one of my students read nine chapters!

Today we discussed what they read and the places the characters traveled. Then, several students placed a push pin in the places the characters traveled to so we can track their journey. Next, I asked students to discuss all the settings and the characters.

I then assigned either a setting or character to each student. I gave each student a small piece of paper and asked them to draw the setting according to the way the author described it. Then, we created an interactive event map. I had all the students line up in front of the class and together we placed the settings in order. Finally, the students numbered the settings and we placed them on the bulletin board and discussed what events happened in each setting. We are going to do this each day so that we can see the events unfold while we are learning about North Carolina. The best part about this unit is that students are so excited to see that their reading about things they learned during their social studies class.